Хеннинг Манкелль - The Eye of the Leopard

I’m really standing on this hill because the view from here is beautiful. Here is the treeless landscape, the endless horizons that my father always looked for. Maybe I think it’s so beautiful because I know that it’s mine.

Here is the beginning and perhaps the end too, a chance journey and even more chance meetings led me here. He decides to pay another visit to Mutshatsha.

In all haste he sets out. It’s the middle of the rainy season and the roads are like liquid mud. Yet he drives fast, as if he were fighting to escape from something. A despair breaks through the barriers. Janine’s trombone echoes in his mind.

He never makes it to Mutshatsha. All at once the road is gone. With his front wheels balanced over a precipice, he looks straight down into a ravine that has opened up. The road has collapsed, and there is no longer a road to Mutshatsha. When he tries to turn the car around, it gets stuck in the mud. He breaks branches from bushes and lays them under the wheels, but the tyres can’t get a firm purchase. In the brief twilight the rain arrives with a roar, and he sits in his car and waits. Maybe no one will come by, he thinks. While I sleep the car might be invaded by wandering ants and when the rainy season is over only my skeleton, picked clean, will be left, polished like a piece of ivory.

In the morning the rain stops and he gets help with the car from some people in a nearby village. Late in the afternoon he arrives back at the farm.

The arc of time expands but suddenly begins to bend towards the earth again.

In the shadows people are grouping around him, and he doesn’t notice what’s happening. It is January 1987. He has now been in Africa for eighteen years.

The rainy season this year is intense and drawn out. The Kafue floods over its banks, the torrential rains threaten to drown his hen houses. Transport lorries get stuck in the mud; power poles topple and cause long power cuts. This is a rainy season like none he has ever experienced before.

At the same time there is more unrest in the country. Throngs of people are on the move; hunger riots strike the cities in the copper belt and Lusaka. One of his egg vans is stopped on its way to Mufulira by an excited mob who empties its cargo. Shots are fired in the night and the farmers refrain from leaving their homes.

Early one morning when Olofson goes to his little office, he finds that someone has flung a large rock through a window of the mud hut. He questions the night watchmen but no one has heard or seen anything.

One older worker stands at a distance and watches as Olofson carries out the questioning. Something in the old African’s face makes him break off abruptly and send the night watchmen home without any sort of punishment. He senses something menacing but can’t say what it is. The work is being done, but a heavy mood rests over the farm.

One morning Luka is gone. When Olofson opens the door to the kitchen at dawn as usual, Luka isn’t there. This has never happened before. Mists roll over the farm after the night’s rain. He calls for Luka but no one comes. He asks questions, but nobody knows, nobody has seen Luka. When he drives to his house, he finds it open with the door flapping in the wind.

In the evening he cleans the firearms he once took over from Judith Fillington, and the revolver he bought ten years earlier from Werner Masterton, the revolver he always keeps under his pillow. During the night he sleeps restlessly, the dreams are hounding him, and suddenly he wakes up with a start. He thinks he hears footsteps in the house, footsteps upstairs, above his head. In the dark he grabs the revolver and listens. But it’s only the wind slithering through the house.

He lies awake, the revolver resting on his chest. In the dark, just before dawn, he hears a car drive up in front of the house and then loud pounding on the front door. With the revolver in his hand he calls through the door and recognises the voice of Robert, Ruth and Werner Masterton’s foreman. He opens the door and realises once again that even a black man can look pale.

‘Something has happened, Bwana ,’ says Robert, and Olofson sees that he is terrified.

‘What happened?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know, Bwana ,’ replies Robert. ‘Something. I think it would be good if Bwana could come.’

He has lived in Africa long enough to be able to distinguish gravity in an African’s enigmatic way of expressing himself.

He dresses quickly, stuffs his revolver in his pocket, and grabs his shotgun. He locks the house carefully, wonders again where Luka is, and then gets into his car and follows Robert. Black rain clouds are scudding across the sky when the two cars turn up towards the Mastertons’ house.

I came here once, he thinks, in another time, as a different person. He recognises Louis among the Africans standing outside the house.

‘Why are they standing here?’ he asks.

‘That’s just it, Bwana ,’ says Robert. ‘The doors are locked. They were locked yesterday too.’

‘Maybe they went on a trip,’ says Olofson. ‘Where’s their car?’

‘It’s gone, Bwana ,’ Robert replies. ‘But we don’t think that they left.’

He looks at the house, its immovable façade. He walks around the house, calls out to their bedroom. The Africans follow him at a distance, expectantly. All at once he is afraid without knowing why. Something has happened.

He feels a vague fear of what he is about to see, but he asks Robert to fetch a crowbar from the car. When he breaks open the front door the alarm sirens don’t go off. As the front door yields he discovers that the telephone line to the house has been cut next to the outer wall.

‘I’m going in alone,’ he says, taking the safety off his gun and pushing the door aside.

What he finds is worse than he could have imagined. As if in a macabre film, he steps into a slaughterhouse, where human bodies lie hacked up all over the floor.

He never will understand why he didn’t pass out at the sight of what he saw.

And afterwards?

What is left?

The last year before Hans Olofson leaves the heavy fir ridges behind, leaves his father Erik Olofson behind in his mute dream of a distant sea that calls inside him. The last year that Janine is alive.

On an early Saturday morning in March 1962, she takes up position on the corner between the hardware shop and the People’s Hall. It’s the very heart of town, the one corner that no one can avoid. In the early morning she raises a placard above her head. On it is a text in black letters that she wrote the night before.

Something unheard of is about to happen. A rumour is growing and threatening to boil over. There are a few people who dare acknowledge that Janine and her lonely placard express a sensible opinion that has been lacking for too long. But their voices disappear in the icy March wind.

The right-thinking ones mobilise. A person who doesn’t even have a nose? Everyone has assumed that she was resting securely in the embrace of Hurrapelle. But now here she stands, the woman who ought to be living unnoticed and hiding her ugly face. Janine knows what thoughts are spreading like wildfire.

And she has also learned something from Hurrapelle’s monotonous exhortations. She knows how to resist when the wind changes and entrenched beliefs fumble for a foothold. She is driving a stake into the slumbering anthill on this early morning. People hurry along the streets, coats flapping, and they read what she has written. Then they hurry on to grab their neighbour by the collar and ask what that crazy woman can possibly mean. Is a noseless shrew going to tell us what to think? Who asked her to raise this unseemly barricade?